Hera promised Hypnos the Grace Pasithea as his bride if he would put Zeus to sleep during the Trojan War. Their union produced the Oneiroi — Morpheus, who takes human form in dreams, Phobetor, who appears as beasts and serpents, and Phantasos, who fashions visions of earth, water, and stone.
⚠ Hesiod's Theogony 212 names the Oneiroi as children of Nyx alone; Ovid's Metamorphoses 11 attributes them to Somnus (Hypnos).
Hypnos commands the Oneiroi — Morpheus, Phobetor, and Phantasos — dispatching them through the gates of horn and ivory to deliver dreams to sleeping mortals and gods.
The Oneiroi number a thousand, but three stand above the rest — Morpheus, who takes human form in dreams, Phobetor, who appears as beasts and serpents, and Phantasos, who fashions visions of earth, water, and stone.
Erebus, the primordial darkness, envelops the cave where Phobetor and the Oneiroi dwell. The nightmares Phobetor shapes draw their power from the deep darkness that Erebus personifies.
The River Lethe flows past the cave where Phobetor and the other Oneiroi dwell with their father Hypnos. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Lethe's murmuring waters maintain the perpetual drowsiness of the dream realm.
Pasithea, one of the Charites promised to Hypnos by Hera, is sometimes named as the mother of Phobetor and the other Oneiroi in variant traditions.
Thanatos is Phobetor's uncle as the twin brother of Hypnos. Sleep and Death dwell together, and the nightmares Phobetor sends often mirror the terrors of mortality that Thanatos embodies.
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